A Reading Life

More Treasure

In my previous blog I wondered if ebooks would herald a resurgence in the publication of short stories and novellas. What I hadn’t fully realised was the extent to which it is already far easier to get hold of collections of short stories that in the past have been very hard to find or prohibitively expensive. A case in point is Michael Gilbert’s Game Without Rules, a collection of stories featuring two ruthless MI5 agents, Mr Calder and Mr Behrens. The last time I looked online this was expensive: if you want a print copy it is £24.45 plus postage. However I have just bought it as an ebook from House of Stratus for £6.17. Another collection of Gilbert’s short stories, Stay of Execution, is a swingeing £212.68 plus postage from the US and that also is available as an ebook from House of Stratus for £6.17. I prefer a hard copy if I think I’ll want to read something more than once, but not at those prices. So when I found that a second-hand paperback copy of Gilbert’s Petrella at Q, is available for £2.75 plus postage, that’s what I went for. Gilbert’s Anything for a Quiet Life was available fron House of Stratus also for £6.17 as an ebook or in this case £8.03 as a new paperback. I went for the paperback. By now I was on something of a roll. There was an article in the most recent edition of CADS (Crime and Detective Stories) about Roy Vickers, writer of the Department of Dead Ends stories, some of which I’ve got in a dear old battered green Penguin. I wondered if more were available. Yes, in an ebook entitled Murder Will Out, available from Bellos at £3.17. That’s now on my ereader. I do buy recent novels too from real bookshops. Last week-end I bought Michael Connolly’s The Black Box and Keith B. Miller’s Norwegian by Night from Waterstone’s. How typical my buying habits are, I don’t know. But I do know that my youthful self who thrilled to the chase, tracking down copies of long out-of-print books in dusty second-hand bookshops, would be amaazed that they can be downloaded in seconds at the click of a mouse. Yes, a lot has been gained, but maybe something has been lost, too.

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4 Comments

I agree with you about the thrill of the chase being a thing of the past but, as I live in Australia, finding the books I wanted to read (mostly English) secondhand was always a bit of a forlorn hope anyway! I love the new availability of long out of print books as affordable ebooks. Lots of my favourite 19th century authors are free & lots more are now available very cheaply. Thanks for mentioning Michael Gilbert. I want to read more of his books & didn’t know HOS had reprinted him.

Thanks, Lyn, and actually it is also a thrill to find something newly available on line. Not to mention lying in bed, finishing a book by an author and being able to download the next in the series instantly!

Bello have revived quite a few books by Roy Vickers, both novels and story collections, and they are very good light reads. As for the great Michael Gilbert, I can strongly recommend Stay of Execution, which contains several of his very best short stories.